The husband rented Hollywoodland (about the death of original TV Superman George Reeves) the other night, as I'd expressed an interest in seeing it at some point. I didn't expect either of the girls to be interested in it--slow-moving, takes place in the fifties, shifts back in forth in time in a potentially confusing way, has very little actual Superman screen time--but, surprisingly, they were. The eight-year-old watched some of it and the twelve-year-old saw it through.
It was a decent movie, but it also got me thinking about the way we relate to the media and how it has changed over time.
There's a scene in the middle of the movie, where Reeves (played by Ben Affleck) is doing some publicity as Superman for an audience of kids. He has just finished the action, when a little boy walks up to him with a gun--a real gun--and asks if he can shoot him. Reeves, shocked, asks him why he'd want to do that; when the boy replies that he wants to see the bullet bounce off of him, Reeves dissuades him by saying that if it did, it might bounce off and hit someone else.
The eight-year-old saw this part and expressed her surprise--"Did kids used to think that people really have powers?" I have no idea whether that scene was at all true, but I think we've gotten so used to the idea of special effects--that you can make anything appear to happen in a realistic way if you just have the technology--that we forget that that wasn't always the case, and the methods used in early special effects weren't publicized all that much. It's possible that an impressionable child of the 50s, seeing Superman fly, lift heavy objects, and be regularly shot in the chest to no effect, might have thought that Reeves was actually doing these things.
Another thought came earlier in the movie, right after Reeves' death, when the private investigator who ends up looking into the death (Louis Simo, played by Adrian Brody) visits his estranged wife and son. The son, like many of the kids in the neighborhood, is practically in shock at Reeves' death. TV's Superman had become such a big part of their lives, and while Simo tries to get across to the boy that Superman is a role played by an actor, it really doesn't seem to register. He tries to comfort him by stressing that Reeves is not Superman, saying "you can still watch him on TV, can't you?" The kid just looks at him--his dad doesn't understand. Superman is dead. The kids just didn't really separate the man from the role.
Similarly, it seems as if adults back then had some difficulty differentiating television actors from their roles. When, finally, Reeves gets a chance to play someone other than Superman--in From Here to Eternity--the adult audience starts shouting Superman catchphrases at the screen, laughing at serious scenes because "Superman" is in them, and so forth. (According to Wikipedia, this actually happened, but rumors that Reeves' scenes were cut because of it are likely untrue. In any case, the role didn't do much for Reeves' non-Super career.) I do know that in the earlier days of film, actors tended to play very much the same roles--good guys were always good guys, romantic leads were always romantic leads, femme fatales were always femme fatales--and it was exceptional when an actor managed to break away from that type-casting. Perhaps audiences were unused to seeing such a change, and perhaps when it was an actor they'd seen mainly on television, so that his or her association with that particular character (not just a type of character) was even more ingrained, it was even harder for the actor to make that break.
Not to mention that, back then, there seems to have been a real gulf between film and television actors, with the former far more esteemed by peers and public. While it's not all that unusual now for an actor who got his or her start in television to make the move to the movies, it was rarer in the past, and it's a far more recent thing for film actors to take on television roles on a regular basis without being movie has-beens (the idea being that television was for actors who couldn't hack it in film).
But the main thing that came to my mind was this: in the mind of the public, Reeves' role as Superman apparently made him famous as a kid-show actor. There's a scene in the movie where he is told that he's got a 91 rating among children (pretty good even in those days of few television channels), and he asks what that means--that no adults are watching? He's told that sure they are, families watch it together--but Superman was apparently not a show that adults would seek out on their own. Grownups in the 50s weren't interested in kid stuff, and for Reeves' career that was the kiss of death.
What struck me is that all that so different from today--any kids show (shows aimed at school-age kids, anyway) you can name is likely to have something of an adult fan base as well. And it's no longer the case that certain themes--superheroes, for example--are limited to kid entertainment. Look at all of us, still reading comics, and the comics have grown up with us. We no longer let go of our "childish things," as was usual in the past--we embrace them, we keep them, we may or may not want them to change but we no longer pass on the comic-reader torch to the next generation. Forty years ago a Spiderman or Fantastic Four movie would have been marketed directly at kids--adults wouldn't have been expected to be interested, and most would not have seen itunless they were taking their kids. Now, adults are the main audience for these movies. Poor George Reeves might have had an easier time of it today.
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